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Finding Other America in Slums and on Farms

With a Danish accent and a gregarious personality, the photographer Peter Sekaer roamed around American slums and struggling farms in the 1930s and ’40s. Government agencies sent him to document efforts to combat poverty, and he charmed his way into homes and shops.

He dutifully took his assigned pictures of new housing projects and rural power lines. But he also trained his camera on children shelling pecans to earn pennies a day, Jim Crow segregated staircases, prostitutes whiling away time between clients and chain gangs building roads. He photographed folk art, too, like roadside mailboxes attached to wooden Uncle Sams and ads for ice cream stands and a phrenologist who “reads your head like an open book.”

His close friend Walker Evans is better known for these kinds of unvarnished images, and they inspired each other. They took government-financed trips together and passed cameras back and forth. Evans, however, lived into his 70s and promoted himself as an artist as well as a documentarian. Sekaer (pronounced SEE-care) had a fatal heart attack in 1950, at 49, leaving his family to deal with stacks of unsorted photographs. Only now is he receiving his scholarly due: “Signs of Life,” a major survey of about 85 of his works, with a 200-page catalog, opens on Saturday at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

“We wanted to uncover this hidden gem,” said Julian Cox, the museum’s photography curator. Sekaer’s career, he added, “was like the passage of a meteor, very bright but fairly brief.”

Sekaer immigrated to the United States from Denmark as a teenager and at first rode freight trains around the country and took odd jobs. In the 1920s he ran a sign painting and printing workshop in New York, saving enough to enroll in art classes with the painters George Grosz and Hans Hofmann and the photographer Berenice Abbott.

Sekaer eventually took on government work, partly to bring American social injustices to light. In the South, he once wrote to a relative, the police would blame any black man nearby for a crime, and the innocent detainee “goes to prison anyway!”

Photo

Peter Sekaer documented the Depression on the streets of New Orleans in the 1930s.Credit
Peter Sekear Estate

But Sekaer did not practice what he called “preaching a ‘documentary’ sermon.” Often he just found and recorded underappreciated beauty in poor neighborhoods: the weathered condemned cottages, posters layered on brick walls and laundry hung in alleys.

After his death his widow, Elisabeth, sifted through his archive, and the family has donated a few works to museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the High Museum. Sekaer’s estate has also consigned photos to Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. The High Museum acquired 53 Sekaer images there. The prints typically cost $3,500 to $7,500. (The gallery also sells Walker Evans works, which can fetch more than $100,000.)

If Sekaer had lived long enough to position himself in galleries, museums and history books, Mr. Greenberg said, “he would have had a great reputation.”

Sekaer’s daughter Christina, a psychiatrist in New York who was 5 when her father died, contributed an essay to the High Museum catalog about her efforts to get to know him through his work and her relatives’ memories. She describes his outspokenness, moodiness and knack for “being aware of what’s right in front of you.” She has tried to imagine how impoverished Americans must have reacted when an adventurous Dane with a German camera started asking about their lives.

“His accent,” she said in a recent phone interview, “helped people want to talk to him.”

CAVIAR GOODS’ FIRE SALE

By court order, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Halsey Minor must sell much of his furniture to help pay his debts to Sotheby’s and a Merrill Lynch affiliate. On Wednesday Phillips de Pury & Company is auctioning about 40 of his pieces. They include everything from 1920s Art Deco armchairs with nickel feet, designed by Paul Dupré-Lafon (estimated at $35,000 to $45,000 for a pair), to a three-year-old white resin table by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec ($20,000 to $30,000).

Phillips’s conservative estimates verge on fire-sale prices. A 1983 glass table resting on bicycle handlebars by the British designer Jasper Morrison, which cost $27,600 at Sotheby’s in 2007, is now expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000. A pod-shaped 1987 aluminum dresser by the British designer Marc Newson, which brought $1 million at Christie’s in 2007, has been marked down to $300,000 to $500,000.

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A hotel maid in Atlanta, 1936, also from the Peter Sekaer show at the High Museum.Credit
Peter Sekear Estate

On May 13, at a court-ordered sale of Mr. Minor’s art collection, Phillips offered half a dozen of his pricier pieces. Mr. Newson’s aluminum lounge chair prototype brought $2.1 million (the high estimate was $1.5 million), but another Newson aluminum lounge (estimated at $400,000 to $600,000) and a pod dresser prototype ($500,000 to $700,000) did not sell.

After those lots passed, Larry Gagosian, a gallerist who has sold Newson furniture to Mr. Minor, spent $242,500 (just shy of the low estimate) on a hollow aluminum table meant to resemble the rim of a black hole.

AN ‘INSANITY EPISODE’

Mary Todd Lincoln’s grief over the deaths of her husband and three of her sons deepened into suicidal depression in 1875, and her surviving son, Robert, sent her to a women’s insane asylum near Chicago. During her four-month stay, she wrote to him, pleading for release, and he burned the letters to conceal her illness. But documentation keeps turning up.

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In the last decade, a few dozen pages of her correspondence with friends from what scholars call her “insanity episode” have emerged from various families’ storage drawers. Next Friday Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati will offer records from the asylum, Bellevue Place, in Batavia, Ill.

The auction lot, estimated at $8,000 to $10,000, contains government orders authorizing Mrs. Lincoln’s institutionalization, a doctor’s letter expressing “grave apprehensions” about her condition, an admissions book listing her as patient No. 208, and a poorly spelled fan letter advising her to escape and “speak out planely.”

The archive, which turned up in the 1930s in the asylum basement, belongs to descendants of Bellevue Place’s owners. The family brought it to an “Antiques Roadshow” appraisal a few years ago, but otherwise kept it tucked away. Most of the other evidence of Mrs. Lincoln’s illness has ended up in institutions including the Library of Congress, said Jason Emerson, the author of “The Madness of Mary Lincoln” (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007).

“I am completely exhilarated” by the Cowan trove, he said. The misspelled fan letter is particularly intriguing, he added. Why was it left at the asylum? “Maybe the doctor confiscated it,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on June 4, 2010, on Page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding Other America In Slums and on Farms. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe